There is no way to put this lightly. I tried giving AIL 2 stars, but I can only offer a 1-star rating due to the abysmal compensation. In 6 months, I earned a total of $4,150.15 (after spending nearly $1400 to get started) despite working 40-50 hours a week, including on Sundays and holidays, and being the best new agent in my agency. Week after week, I saw new agents who came after me either quit, or look more and more miserable during Zoom calls as they dealt with the pain of constant rejection and failing to earn a paycheck (yes, it was very common to see people earn $0 per week). Being conservative with my estimate, I earned roughly $5/hour. After investing money in a new laptop and life insurance licenses, that number drops to around $3/hour. It is obvious that working at McDonald’s would have provided me with better compensation, or moving to the Philippines and cleaning toilets.
I will divide this review into a few sections, to criticize both the work culture, and compensation structure, and provide my personal experiences here. First, let’s start with how much money you’ll invest in your business to start, and then get to compensation.
INITIAL INVESTMENT
The lies began from the interview and the way the job was advertised on an online job board. I needed a job fast, so I was excited to get an interview. Now I realize, these interviews are extremely easy to get. To this day, I get spammers emailing me and asking me if I want to join their agency (other life insurance companies). Life insurance companies are constantly recruiting because of the high turnover rate and because recruitment is crucial to progressing upwards as I’ll explain later.
I didn’t realize at first how much it would cost to start working at AIL. The LAST thing I wanted to do was spend money to earn money. I wanted to get paid for my work, skills, and effort. But I had to get a life insurance license. It cost about $300 to take the test and pay for the license. My managers were not upfront about it and I was a little surprised. But I went through with it since I had already decided to start working there.
Then once again, a bit later, I had to come up with more cash. I wish the managers told me about this so I would not work there anymore (but then they suffer as they need you more then you need them). It turns out, in order to use the eApp software required to transmit electronic sales, you need Windows. I had a Mac. $1000 later, I was able to make sales at AIL and make money.
My manager downplayed these investments all the time. He said “yeah it costs very little to start working here! You can get a Windows laptop for like $300 that’s nothing!” A cheap laptop only costs you more later when it freezes and cannot handle multiple applications being open at the same time. But at the end of the day, this was my decision.
What I don’t like is that none of this is apparent in the beginning and the communication is not clear. Since I already bought the license, I figured I would just get the computer too. I gave them a chance. I should have seen this as a warning sign.
COMPENSATION & THE NUMBERS:
What my managers told me was that all the hard work now would pay off in two years. What they didn’t tell me was how the business itself cannot ensure a liveable income for any new agent no matter how hard they work. Very few people stayed until the two-year may anyway because they failed to see a progressive increase in their earnings. It certainly could make sense to earn next-to-nothing at first in a job where you would be promised 100x that in the future. One of the biggest factors in this job not paying workers anything is that many agents are now virtual, and the systems in place that applied to traditional in-person insurance sales do not work over the phone. I was hired as a virtual agent.
I conducted zero in-person appointments, and my managers did not have a foolproof system in place to predict the amount of work required to earn the same amount of money in this virtual environment. They were in fact totally out of touch with reality and made no virtual sales themselves (unless they were guaranteed the sale or something). Realize this is a sales job, so most of the numbers you will hear are a stretch anyway. AIL is also an MLM, which I will get to shortly, which means that you will hear mostly hyperbole and lies from management. So I can’t trust that life insurance sales at AIL before COVID worked either.
But here’s exactly what they told me an “average” agent makes at AIL, and therefore, what I should expect. This was what I was told in one of our first workshops. Based on the numbers, I should expect to make:
-40 calls an hour (minimum)
-Set 2 appointments per hour
-Have 1 of those appointments show up
-Sell 1 in 2 appointments that show up
Translating to:
-3 sales a week
-$660 average ALP per sale
-Roughly $1000 earnings per week
REALITY
The reality was completely different, and my managers never told me about it. It was when we had one workshop with one of the higher-ups I realized the numbers my managers were telling me were way off. This manager said that with the virtual environment, it’s taking 40-50 calls to set just one appointment.
Based on my calculations, I realized I would need to make 3,000 – 4,000 calls between Monday – Sunday in order to hope to reach my income goals.
But it’s not just setting appointments that’s different. EVERYTHING changed. The virtual sales environment was a complete nightmare, and it affected all aspects of the sales process including:
-Average ALP per sale
-Number of sales per week
-Show ratio
-Client retention
To understand this better, let’s talk about how you are paid.
COMMISSION
They said that if I made 3 sales in a week, I’d earn roughly $1000, which corresponds to a 50% commission, and $2000 ALP per week. The numbers changed a bit later but here’s what I got paid:
-60% commission
-60% advance
On the surface, a 60% commission sounds like easy money. 60% of $2000 is $1200. But you only get 60% of that 60% in your paycheck (the advance), which corresponds to 36%. That means, if you sell $2000 ALP in a week, you will receive $720 in your paycheck the next Friday (2000 * 0.36), NOT $1200.
The other 24% of your commission only comes on one condition: the sale “stuck.” What that means is that the client didn’t cancel within a certain period of time (usually a few months). If they cancel, it means you don’t get the rest of your commission. This statistic is called your “retention.” So ultimately, 60% is extremely low. At other companies, you’ll get 100% commission.
Furthermore, in the virtual environment, and with the high-pressure sales tactics AIL (and most life insurance companies actually) use, sales were canceled a lot. When I looked through records, I saw that many of my colleagues had sales that lasted only a few months. I frequently came across dissatisfied customers who were sold a large policy but financially regretted it later. You can search for other policies sold by other agents through your Impact.
For example, one of the highest managers in my agency sold a young woman (mid-30’s) with no children a $150,000 whole life policy. She told me that she didn’t need it and just wanted to “help out a friend.” She was frustrated. I couldn’t understand why this manager sold someone such a large policy which was more than what she needed.
With lower-than-normal retention, you will have to work harder and longer in order to finally receive your passive renewal paychecks after you’re 100% vested in the company (next section) in 10 years.
Overall, the “average” agent’s numbers actually put them at the top of the company. So what my manager told me was “average” was way off, because he probably ignored the masses of people that made no money and quit. If you sell about $94,000 ALP in a year (about $2000 ALP a week, and just $60k max in earnings), you are invited to their special convention. You can easily find sales jobs that pay $50k in base salary. Most of my managers didn’t even hit these average numbers.
RENEWALS
Perhaps the only exciting part about selling life and health insurance is the prospect of earning your renewals. Someone who buys life insurance from you is paying into the policy year after year. You only have to sell them once. The insurance company keeps benefitting from their business until they are deceased.
Remember that 60% commission I talked about? That applies to the first year of business. But after that, you get only 2-3%. But, you have to wait 10 years to get it. It works like this. If you quit after a year, you’ll get 10% of that 2-3%. After 5 years, you get 50%. After 10 years, you’re “fully vested” which means all those sales you built over 10 years will continue to pay you until everyone you sold is deceased. So if you sold $1 million of ALP in 10 years and they all stuck, you will now get $20k a month. The reality is you won’t get anywhere near there. And that would be considered basically “average.” But, getting even halfway there isn’t bad. It means you sold $50k ALP for 10 years (after cancellations). Based on my numbers and what I saw from other agents, even getting there wasn’t easy, but maybe doable.
At other insurance companies, you will be 100% vested from the beginning. I would rather do that than slave away for 10 years.
LEADS
I want to comment on the most important part of a successful life insurance book of business: having qualified leads.
To sell insurance, you need people to sell to. The best leads are the kinds that mail in response cards indicating interest in life insurance. AIL doesn’t use those leads but they do use other mailers, which is good. The problem is these leads cost a LOT, and although you get “free” leads at AIL, the mailers you get are mostly recycled or really old and therefore completely useless. The majority of the time, I was calling mailers that were called before. Or they mailed it in so long ago they don’t even remember. As a result, I did not manage to sell a single one of these mailer leads.
If you sell life insurance as an independent agent, you put in your own money. This I would say is WAY BETTER than working for AIL because from what I saw, AIL does not invest nearly as much as a successful independent agent invests in his or her leads. Typically, an independent agent needs to spend close to 2 grand on leads and expect a 5x return minimum.
The best mail-in leads at AIL (people who were never contacted before and recently mailed something in through their union) were scarce. But the best agents received more of them and prioritized selling them. They were inconsistent too but I would say I never received more than 50 of them in a single month. From my research, you need 100 leads a week to get anywhere in life insurance.
To compensate for this, my managers told me to prioritize referrals. I suspect one reason for that is because they could not afford to give us real leads. They told us that referrals have a higher close ratio and that we would get further with referrals than with the mail-in leads. They shared some numbers as usual. But then, in a workshop given by one of the best agents in the business, I learned that this agent used absolutely zero referrals, and only worked the mail-in leads. Her manager and team prioritized these leads, and she had access to a lot of them.
Once again, my managers were full of lies. They pretty much just told us to ignore this workshop, even though this agent made money that wouldn’t be possible at my agency. Our best agent never even came close to her numbers. “Get more referrals! I was told. So I did. I gathered more referrals than most other agents. But then I realized almost none of them show up.
Some leads you might get are even fake. I received a call after I kid about a child safety kit. I know I never indicated my interest in a CSK and don’t even have a child. The agent who called me received a completely fake lead. How often did AIL do this to other agents? Speaking of CSK leads, they were supposed to have a 70% close ratio. But I got about 1 in 35 of them to show up and none of them sold. Clearly, it was impossible to build a book of business with such poor show ratios.
YOU HAVE TO RECRUIT PEOPLE TO GET ANYWHERE (MLM ALERT!)
From the very beginning, I was encouraged to recruit people. I didn’t want to recruit people I wanted to make sales and make money. But eventually my managers told me that you can’t have consistent income until you get to the level of SA and have people under you. These contracts are different and I am not entirely sure how they work but they guarantee more income it sounds like. Even then, my manager didn’t make a lot, and certainly not enough to be worth the effort in my opinion.
This is typical of any MLM. You can’t make enough money from just selling the product. You ultimately have to recruit as many people as possible and earn money off of them. This is not true of all insurance companies.
CRINGE “HUSTLE” CULTURE
One of the strangest aspects of working with AIL was the amount of ridiculous self-help content my managers threw at us all the time. I realized that if self-help was the bread and butter of staying motivated, the business probably wasn’t good. At least, that’s what another life insurance agent from another agency explained to me. The constant motivational pep-talks eventually just fell on deaf ears for me and a lot of other agents.
Your managers want you to slave away without thinking like a shrewd businessperson who looks at numbers, statistics, and knows the ins and outs of the life insurance business. At AIL, you don’t manage anything other than your own effort, which is a major downside. In other life insurance sales jobs, you need to become an expert in finding leads, life insurance providers, and in sales techniques. At AIL, you only think about calling people and saying the same thing over and over again. They don’t want you to think about the compensation structure and the numbers in more detail.
My manager even frowned upon the saying “work smarter,” when in reality all of them just make money off of us and it doesn’t matter if we quit or not.
The managers were also totally out of touch with the reality of virtual sales. One of my higher-ups said that we should aim to set 80 appointments in a week. That would take 4000 calls a week, or nearly 700 calls in a day. That means working 12 hours a day, making 60 calls an hour, in addition to running appointments. It’s impossible.
Another aspect of toxic hustle culture was that we were told to believe that if we didn’t succeed in something, it wasn’t the fault of AIL or the sales system, but our own fault. I can honestly see the merit of taking accountability, but it’s not true that it’s always going to be your fault. It certainly wasn’t my fault when we received child-safe leads that were filled out by people 1.5 years ago, and none of them could remember filling it out. These leads were garbage and they were all I received one month. I made 0 sales that month and quit right after.
But I wasn’t supposed to think that. It was my fault. I just need to work harder. This was especially funny to me when I found out that one of the best agents was a mom who only ran 3 appointments a day, and only in the afternoons.
She worked smart. She wasn’t on our team.
MANIPULATIVE WORK CULTURE
My manager frequently said “we’re so blessed man… we’re just so blessed to be here at AIL.” His theory was that if he felt really great about it and put up a façade, all the new agents would believe it. At the end of the day, that’s manipulation, especially if you try to use Christian language, as who doesn’t want to be blessed? It’s not just this one instance. It was during most pep talks where they want you to feel a certain way so you don’t quit.
Once, the manager told me I wasn’t following the phone script exactly, even though I read verbatim from it. I asked him how I wasn’t following the script and he then told me I was not listening to him and that he doesn’t want to “waste his time” and has “coached hundreds of agents.”
PROS
What’s hilarious is that one “pro” of working at AIL that I was told about was that I would get paid for training. But in what type of job should you not get paid for training? I earned more from training on average than I did in the field eventually. I actually should have quit right after training because I was about to be lined up for a much better job with a salary. But I regrettably gave AIL a chance.
QUITTING
When it was finally time to quit, I was also gravely disappointed.
I realized I needed a real job and consistent income but I also didn’t want to leave entirely and immediately. I just wanted to make maybe a few sales here and there, especially because YOU CAN’T GET UNEMPLOYMENT AS A 1099. But at least at my agency, as soon as you want to quit, the management ghosts you, removes you from all groups, and cuts you off. You’re basically an enemy now. It took me 4 months to find a really good job, but I could have used unemployment or something in the meantime.
It was funny because my managers told me near the time I quit “thanks for all your hard work,” trying to suck up to me and make me feel appreciated. But after I quit, they provided no support, and just ghosted me entirely. They’re used to it of course.
CONCLUSION
I think insurance is an important sector. But where I worked specifically, there was no money to be made. AIL has many different branches so my experience may not apply to you. But I can say with 100% certainty that my experience applies to the specific branch I worked for.
Would I sell life insurance again? No. But if I could invest $20k a year into leads and manage everything myself, was fully vested from the get-go, received a very high commission, and didn’t need to recruit people in order to earn consistent income, I would have given it a go if I could go back in time.
Working at AIL was one of the stupidest decisions of my life.
